Aibu for being increasingly worried about the job market?

[gymboe]

another threat of redundancy here. Business not going well and to be honest we are full steam ahead with AI.

a quick search in my large town in south of England:

• 5 x nhs jobs (4 of which I am not qualified for and one is really terrible pay as just three days per week)
• school jobs: just three and very low pay
• our high street is mostly made of charity shops and vape stores. Retail doesn’t offer what I want.
• a big employer now hardly owns any office space. There are just a few jobs. I’m not qualified.

I do have a degree but found myself in a specialised account/client mgmt type role. Pays around £50k.

10 years ago there were loads of these type of jobs, decent salary even if you had to start low, good career progression, hundreds of them and tonnes of temp agencies. And the nhs had loads of admin jobs. Not to mention school jobs being plentiful.

where the hell have they all gone?

this is a huge issue. Massive. I’m really worried.

No joke. It’s what people are likely to be told.

But why would they be when there are plenty of people from Nigeria who are happy to do the jobs?

You haven’t heard of Reform, then?

I think support for Reform would very quickly crumble when people realised there was literally nobody left under their initial policies to enable basic needs to be met.

I think democracy is crumbling. Too many unrealistic expectations.

It’s not as if people’s aren’t already finding sewage running through their homes in floods, water supplies cut off for days or longer, unable to get GP appointments, turned away from A&E, not diagnosed or treated until illnesses are terminal, rubbish not taken away, etc.

Get yourself on LinkedIn and put that you’re available to work. Make sure you’ve completely filled out your profile with all of your skills - not just your job titles.

Then search jobs on LinkedIn- it will show you jobs that match your skills and you can shape your cv - to highlight your skills. Make sure it’s ATS proof. Also don’t be afraid to apply for jobs you don’t have all the experience for.

"As no one works they can’t tax workers, they have to tax those that supply AI services. Which makes supplying AI less attractive to those suppliers."

This from a pp is essential! AI is here and not going anywhere. We need to be included into a multi country, cross border, dare I say it a union?

I did not vote Brexit, but that's by the by in this turn of events which is one for the books.

AI is not currently regulated, so easily available, moving very fast to the point pretty much all senior leaders of most industries are being asked to embrace or use it.

We need to make sure that this is in our interest, morally and commercially. In my opinion we CANNOT do that alone.

I work in charity sector tech and can't afford not to use it. The overseas competition for my job is using it.

I can't afford principles.

We are at least using it to do more, faster, and not to replace people we would never be allowed to hire anyway.

You're right to worry but you can be as proactive as possible.

I was made redundant due to AI 18m ago and it took 9m for me to get my next role.

Global company rather than local
Got my job through networking and agencies. The thousand jobsn applied for directly on job boards, auto rejection even though I was exactly the experience. It was tough, scary, exhausting but you've got to be in the right place at the right time.

You're not redundant yet, you're ahead of the game. Start networking and getting yourself ready.

You're not wrong to be worried the job market is brutal. Good luck.

This isn't all due to AI though most companies are slow to adapt due to fears of confidentiality etc. This is due to taxation changes made by Labour which increase the burden of employment. I've just made the decision not to employ more staff, we have a project for them to go onto but I'm opting to stretch staff and programmes to minimise the need for more staff. I wouldn't have done that a year ago.

Its machine learning too, so the more people use it, the more accurate it becomes.

YADNBU - and all this extra time to go online with everyone being unemployed will increase social alienation, incelism and misogyny, online porn will increase, with no income stream available crime will increase and those who do work will be increasingly stressed by the added pressure of more crazy desperate people around and employer pressure from rising costs and hundreds of people waiting to take your job.
And still AI produces masses of slop - I’m going off Pinterest for example as it’s all just rubbish fake crap and adverts.
Time for a 4 day working week / automatically allow part time work and job sharing to spread the income between more people?

I agree completely. My employer has just finished a major round of redundancies and it looks like I'm okay for now but I'm sure this isn't the end of it. I've been scoping the job market and made a few tentative enquiries and what amazes me is 1) how many fake job postings seem to be about 2) how many employers and agencies will literally ghost you. Just take your details and ghost. Why?!

Sadly I agree. There was an interesting long read in the guardian a few years ago about military and defence being the business model of the US and this is what will lead us down this path. It makes a lot of money for a few people and keeps the drones happy. So sad.

Need a job? Get one!
Got no money? Just be rich!
Sick and dying? Just be well!

@BoredZelda could you say which industry and rough location you’re in? I’m interested to know what’s growing

Anecdata but may add some positivity, I do know a couple of people recently in marketing / digital management who’ve found new jobs, took a few months but got there.

Only if people use it well. Crap in, crap out.

If you’re talking about the IPG and Omnicom merger, I’ve been caught in the cross hairs and I’m redundant as a result of it. I’ve got a colleague caught in the same position who has bags of great experience, a CV to die for and has now been out of work nearly 10 months.

The biggest problem though is that no one has been hiring entry level talent since the pandemic in any kind of numbers, so there’s no budding talents coming up through the industry with that golden 5 years experience. We’ve just got 8-10 year climbers who are stagnant with no drive and no opportunity, and senior leaders with no industry to lead. Then we’re solving this by automating all the jobs that used to train entry level staff on how the industry worked. Reporting, platform management, data scuttling is all done by AI now so we’re getting young ones through to manager level who can’t do the very very basics expecting £50k for turning up to work.

I was lucky I kept my network going, so when I was pretty confident I would be made redundant I was able to pull a favour behind the scenes and slide into a role at a competitor that I’d been courting for a while, but most of my colleagues haven’t yet found work. It’s horrifying.

I work in Legal IT, in a large Law Firm, I’ve sat through many demos of AI tools that vendors want us to buy and honestly only one so far has been a goer from a cost/benefit perspective. It allowed us to reduce headcount slightly in the Costs Drafting and Admin teams. Most were useless, marketing solutions to problems that don’t really exist, some were potentially useful but too expensive.

At the same time, it has never been more expensive to actually employ people, so people who leave aren’t being replaced, everyone’s workload is growing, staff are becoming burnt out, time off for work related stress is higher than pre-covid levels. If this trajectory continues, we will probably reconsider some of the AI tools that fell into the ‘potentially useful but too expensive’ bucket.

What scares me is how many people are using freebie AI for everything, knowing it leads to cognitive decline. You can tell lots of replies on mumsnet have been through it.

I'm so sorry for you.
Can you be explicit in telling us what your career was?

Humans - potentially useful but too expensive.

Not that businesses and people using AI give a flying fuck about the actual costs of AI, of course. Let’s all prioritise the massive energy and resource consumption required by AI and go to war over rare earth minerals. Wouldn’t we all rather have our water rationed and given to us in small bottles so that we can use our water to keep our mighty AI data centres running? We don’t need energy to keep ourselves warm, comfortable or actively employed, we need it so that we can keep AI busy and keep competing with the rest of the world until we have drained it of sentient life.

Universal basic income could be the answer to how we mitigate the risks of AI, but that would require taxing corps at close to 100%, so that no one can become mega rich from automating their workforce out of a job. If you make more than £200k in profit per person you employ, then your tax rate is 90% on the excess and your taxes pay the UBI for the people who would have had a job. There’s no incentive for companies to automate and reduce roles. Of course, you would need to introduce the tax rate globally, or introduce a way of taxing anyone who sells/ profits from the U.K. market. NHS is dismantled and becomes an insurance based system, but the UBI per person is £2k from birth and increases by £2k a year from 10 years old to a maximum of £50k per person. From that, it’s a legal requirement to have health insurance. All health insurers have to pay tax in the U.K. at UK full rates to access our market. No pensions, no benefits, no national insurance. No job seekers, no PIP, no child benefit, Just UBI. Everyone gets the same, and it’s enough, always, to lead a dignified life whether you’re single, in a couple, a family etc. if you want more, do a job AI can’t do (caring, growing, building etc) or invent or create something with your time. If you choose not to that’s fine, be content with UBI for life. We need people like that as much as we need the productive ones.

Because of course the entire world will accept that and there will be plenty of food, water, temperature control, shelter and harmless entertainment to go around. What could possibly go wrong? 🤔